This is the sort of story that really gets my back up – it’s a story about the state looking to catch benefit claimants out and making sure to utilise every one of the petty ways open to it to do this. Why aren’t bailed-out bankers hauled out for the sort of probing described below?

A few days ago, I spoke again to this young woman. She is 22 years old and has a four-year-old daughter. She’s been trying to sort out her Universal Credit claim for ages.

She told me about an argument she’d had at a London jobcentre she’d recently signed on with. It’s the sort of story I hear a lot – it’s about a jobcentre adviser and a benefits claimant arguing the toss over a small expenditure that appeared on a bank statement. This story may not sound like a big deal to some, but it is. I think that this nit-picky reading of bank statements by officials is one reason why people don’t apply for state help to which they may well be entitled.

So.

At one of this young woman’s jobcentre meetings, a jobcentre adviser who was reading through the young woman’s bank statements happened upon a small payment to a fast food establishment. This immediately turned into a drama – doubtless heard by many the jobcentre, given the total lack of privacy in these places. The adviser demanded to know how and why the young woman was spending money on burgers and blah blah blah.

The young woman told me that a friend gave her some of the money afterwards to pay for the food, but that they had used her card at the time, because the friend didn’t have the cash with her to pay then and there. It was the sort of on-the-spot arrangement that takes place between friends around the world about a million times an hour, etc. Or should I say – it was the sort of on-the-spot arrangement that some people are permitted to make and others are not. Those who earn their “own” money are allowed to make those sorts of agreements with friends. People who receive benefits are not. They must make sure that they are in a position to justify every penny and know that they will be dealt to if they can’t, or if some official somewhere doesn’t like their explanation, etc. A bank statement does not, of course, offer any sort of back story. It simply lists financial transactions. The jobcentre adviser in this case assumed, of course, that the young woman was lying when she said somebody else paid towards the food. The subtext was and always is, of course, that the young woman was a) wildly irresponsible financially, b) a pisstaking benefits claimant and c) flush with cash.

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I have posted below a letter received by a Kentish Town* man who is in his early 60s and disabled.

The man receives housing benefit for his one-room housing association flat.

The letter is from Camden Council.

As you can see, the letter is very unpleasant. I am sure that I would not want to get one of these. The letter begins with an accusation. It says that the council has received correspondence from the DWP which *suggests* the Kentish Town man has another person living with him. The letter gives no details about that correspondence. Neither does it explain how the DWP’s correspondence led the council to believe that another person was living in the Kentish Town man’s home. No proof or evidence to support this accusation is offered. The letter simply makes a statement. It also makes a threat. The letter says that the Kentish Town man’s housing benefit claim could be in jeopardy if he does not answer the points raised.

You can imagine how people feel when this sort of thing drops through the door:

This is the kind of filthy correspondence that people receive from councils and government departments out of the blue. DWP Customer Compliance letters strike the same sinister tone. So, as I understand it, do the letters received by people who have their child tax credit after being accused of living with people they’ve never heard of.

I see a lot of these letters. They cause an extraordinary amount of stress for people. They absolutely assume guilt from the off and tell people to prove their innocence. Certainly, that’s how the recipients of these letters perceive things:

“Councils, government departments and their associates regularly state that they will come down hard on people who abuse their staff, yet they ought to be aware how their standard procedures and threatening standard text approaches are in themselves abusive,” the man in this story wrote to me. “Just because we have no real bargaining power does not give them licence to bully us about.”

Indeed. Continue reading →

Dealing with a couple of people who are waiting to find out if they’ll get a PIP appeal tribunal hearing and a date for that hearing if they do get one.

Does anyone know how long people typically have to wait to hear back after they’ve requested an appeal, or is this another part of things that is all over the place.

If you’d rather email than leave a comment on this, contact details are here.

Okay.

Here’s another example of the utter dysfunction of the benefits system, from its myriad useless angles. I think we can safely say that we’ve reached the point where hardly an aspect of this bureaucracy is fit for purpose (see other articles I’ve posted recently for plenty more on that. The whole thing is out of control. It doesn’t even make sense). I’m pretty sure that I could run a better system myself out of a garage, pissed. I reckon I get two or three calls and/or emails a week about the sort of monumental bureaucratic mess described below at the moment. These situations require endless phone calls (and ages spent on hold), letters, challenges, visits to welfare advisers (if anyone can find them) and appeals to MPs and councillors. It never, ever ends.

These sorts of situations are also almost impossible for one person to deal with. That point needs to be made loud and clear. The calls take hours, as do the letters, application forms and time needed to source support information. Calls go unanswered and letters and certificates go missing, or aren’t acknowledged for ages. There’s no way that people can sort out problems of this magnitude by themselves these days. Finding a welfare rights adviser with the time to help is often just not a starter. Those services have gone, or are so oversubscribed that people no longer bother to try. I know this, because I’ve queued myself at places like the CAB and found all appointments gone by 9am.

So.

I’ve just been talking with a woman I know well. She is 22 years old and has a four-year-old daughter. This young woman has about £20 a week to live on at the moment. Here’s a list of the way things are going for her with benefit claims at the moment. This could be anybody’s story, too. God knows I hear plenty similar.

In the past month or so, this young woman has:

– Had her child tax credit stopped, purportedly because she has another person living with her. She has never heard of this person. In her life. You’ll will know, of course, that many other people are dealing with the same sort of situation and the collapse of this part of the system.

This begs a number of questions, one of which I would like answered as a matter of priority. Shouldn’t the DWP, HMRC, councils and their various useless provider companies be required to provide evidence of all this alleged cohabitation BEFORE accusations are made and benefits are actually withdrawn? What is this system where an accusation is made and money simply stopped? Why is the onus on people who receive such payments to prove that they’re innocent? In the last week or so, my phone really has been buzzing with calls and emails from people who are experiencing these sorts of problems. There’s a guy I’m working with in north west London at the moment who has been accused of sharing his home with some bloke he’s simply never heard of. His council says that the DWP has imparted this information and that it’s his responsibility to prove that the bureaucrats are wrong. If he doesn’t, his housing benefit will be cut. Wtf. Really. Homelessness lies at the end of that path.

I digress. Continue reading →

A little more about mental health conditions and unemployment as described by people who are experiencing those things in our hardbitten day and age:

I was at Oldham jobcentre last week. Outside, I spoke for some time with Peter*, a man in his 40s who struck up a conversation because he was nervous about going into the jobcentre for a meeting he’d been called to.

In the course of our discussion, Peter said he had depression so severe that he was hospitalised earlier this year for it. (It seemed that his jobcentre adviser knew about this depression. When Peter came out of the meeting later on, he showed me a leaflet about counselling sessions with numbers to call. His jobcentre adviser had given him the leaflet). Peter was unkempt on the day we met. He was dressed in sweatpants, a faded top and the soft pull-on shoes that some people wear as slippers. He said that he lived in a council house with his brother and mum. He was articulate, although I found him hard to follow at times, because we jumped between topics. I’ve transcribed the conversation below. I’m writing this to give you an idea of the way that people speak.

I’m also writing this to give you an idea of the DWP’s pettiness and threats. Such a lot of government communication with the unemployed takes this petty, but threatening, tone. We’ve seen that many, many times before, of course, but another look won’t go amiss. Peter showed me the letter that he’d received which called him to that day’s jobcentre meeting. He let me take a photo of it. I’ve posted a copy below. You’ll see this letter says that Peter’s Universal Credit will be docked if he missed his meeting without good reason (whatever that is these days) – he’ll lose £10.40 per day. It was a crappy threat on a crappy piece of paper – contempt written all over the thing. This is the sort of letter that the DWP sends to people with serious mental health conditions:

The threat certainly had its intended effect.

“It’s a good job I come down today, because that’s what would have happened to me, you know,” Peter said. “Sanctions, that’s what happened [to me] last year. Like it’s a long time – 91 days.”

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This ought to tell you something about the criminal waste of time and money that is our disability assessment system:

As readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the benefit assessment experiences of Sean (name changed), a 53-year-old man who has Asperger’s and severe depression and anxiety.

I’ve listed below some of the benefit assessments and reassessments – and associated DWP blunders and screwups, which is in many ways the real list – that Sean and his partner (who has a schizophrenia diagnosis) have experienced in recent times. They’re still in the middle of this non-stop assessment, of course. There literally is never a time when they’re not in the middle of one benefit assessment or another. They’re always filling in forms, waiting to be called to assessment, being called to assessment, going to assessment, waiting for assessment outcomes, appealing assessment outcomes, or being told to fill in a new set of forms.

But here’s the point I really want to make. There really isn’t any sort of service around that might change or improve their circumstances in any way. Quite the reverse. All of this couple’s support has been removed in the last few years. They had a social worker a few years ago, but lost that service because council funding was cut. The two used to attend a community mental health service (that’s where they met), but had to stop going there, because services were cut. They used a local welfare advice centre for some support with filling in application forms, but just received a letter saying that social security support at that service will end, because the housing association that funded part of it is pulling out. They are at the point where there is literally nobody around to help or to accompany them to face-to-face assessments. We get all this waffle from the DWP and government about getting people back to work and blah blah blah. At the same time, all familiar, useful and complex support is removed.

Still, the DWP assesses and assesses and assesses these people. I don’t know why the department expects things to have changed from one assessment to the next. A torrent of mail and paperwork pours through this couple’s door from the DWP and the council and their housing association. Some of the letters and processes don’t even make sense, as you’ll see below.

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The story below is pretty extraordinary. It’s a classic example of the DWP’s extreme dysfunction and bureaucratic tangling. It also demonstrates how very few rights of appeal disabled people really have when they apply for benefits:

I’ve posted below a letter which was received last week by Sean (named changed), a man in his 50s who has an Asperger’s diagnosis and serious depression and anxiety. (I’ve been writing about Sean’s struggle to apply for Personal Independence Payment, the benefit that is meant to replace Disability Living Allowance).

About a month ago, Sean found out that his application for PIP had been turned down. Then, bizarrely, just a few days after he received that rejection letter, Sean got a letter from the DWP which said that his Mandatory Reconsideration of his PIP rejection decision had already been carried out and the decision to reject his PIP appeal upheld. Mandatory Reconsideration is the review that PIP applicants must ask for if they want to challenge a DWP decision about their PIP application. When people request a Mandatory Reconsideration, they can ask the DWP to review the reasons why they were turned down. The problem for Sean was that the DWP carried out a Mandatory Reconsideration of its decision to deny him PIP without telling or involving him. Sean didn’t request the Mandatory Reconsideration that the DWP did and he never had the chance to contribute to it. More than that – the letter Sean received about this random Mandatory Reconsideration showed that the DWP carried it out BEFORE it made a decision about Sean’s original PIP application. Sean didn’t request that Mandatory Reconsideration, because he didn’t even know his PIP application had been rejected when it was done. He was very upset about that, with good reason.

So – Sean wrote to the DWP to complain about this Mandatory Reconsideration going on without him. He asked the DWP to run his review again – and to this time give him a chance to contribute to it. He got this letter in return – a letter which says Sean’s Mandatory Reconsideration has already been done as far as the DWP is concerned and so that is the end of that:

The upshot is that Sean has been denied his right to tell the DWP why he believes he should get PIP. He also ended up with only two days to make an appeal against the PIP rejection to tribunal, because the DWP said he had to meet the appeal deadlines set out in the original random Mandatory Reconsideration letter.

It can be hard to keep up with all of this, you know. Kafkaesque really doesn’t begin to describe it. Makes you wonder how many sick or disabled people are denied benefits and their right to appeal if a decision goes against them. Let’s not forget either that Sean’s PIP application was turned down because he got extremely upset at his face-to-face assessment. His Asperger’s and anxiety mean that he finds coping with face-to-face assessments and meetings very difficult. No adjustments were made for that, though. The DWP’s decision to deny him PIP because of his Asperger’s and his struggle to cope in stressful situations such as benefit assessments with unsympathetic strangers was rotten in itself.

That situation is being followed up, believe me.

#RightsNotGames

Join Disabled People Against Cuts next week as they protest against cuts to disability rights and support. Details of events here.